As he sat in his truck, Ritzheimer held up a pocket-sized copy of the U.S. Constitution and explained to his two daughters that he's in Oregon — and not with them on Christmas and New Year's Eve — because he took an oath to defend the Founding Father's document:

“You see, [I] swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, which is blatantly under attack. But the only way to defend it is to actually take a stand and defend it."

Ritzheimer is one of about a dozen other armed protesters that took over an unoccupied building on a federal wildlife preserve in Burns, Oregon to protest the "tyranny and oppression" of the U.S. federal government. The protest came after a federal judge ordered two Oregon ranchers to serve their full prison sentence for arson.